What is the Difference Between Marketing and Advertising?

Although the terms "marketing" and "advertising" are closely related, they should not be used interchangeably. It is important to understand the relationship and differences between advertising and marketing to effectively reach your goal, whether it is raising awareness, increasing engagement, converting leads for your business, or overall business growth.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is a mix of all the activities that a company performs to communicate, promote, and sell products or services to customers, such as research, processes, strategies, branding, and other activities, including advertising. These activities are conveniently referred to as the "marketing mix".

Marketing is hard to define as it is omnipresent across all stages of a product's or service's life cycle and often overlaps with other company activities, mainly sales.

For example, marketing a law firm might include:

• Market research,
• processes,
• brand identity,
• website design,
• landing page,
• search engine optimization (SEO),
• blogging,
• social media,
• email,
• advertising (which we'll cover in detail later),
• and data analysis.

What is Advertising?

Advertising is an element of a marketing mix. While most marketing activities are part of a pull or inbound strategy that aims to attract customers through content (what is inbound marketing?), advertising is part of a push or outbound strategy that aims to promote and sell a product or service by placing an advertisement in front of customers.

For example, advertising an online clothing store might include:

• Paid search,
• promoted social media posts,
• influencer marketing,
• online banners,
• magazine ads,
• coupons,
• and data analysis.

Advertising and other outbound marketing methods are considered interruptive. While advertising is still an effective marketing strategy for products, it is becoming increasingly less effective for services. Inbound marketing methods produce a higher number of sales-qualified leads for your sales team, resulting in increased close rates.

Now that you know more about the relationship and differences between advertising and marketing, you can optimize your marketing mix to reach your goals faster and more efficiently.